Oil Industry

The Permian Basin in West Texas — already the nation's highest-producing oilfield — is seeing a surge in production, and drillers are extracting more crude oil than refiners here can handle. But now, oil companies in the basin have new outlets for that oil, and it's having an economic impact hundreds of miles away.

"This is not a bubble; this is real growth,” Port of Corpus Christi vessel traffic controller Mike Stineman says as he scans real-time navigation charts. Radio chatter between vessels, the Coast Guard and the Vessel Control Center provide a nonstop audio backdrop for Stineman's day-to-day work.

An appeals court in Washington, D.C., has blocked an attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency to delay Obama-era methane regulations, rejecting claims by the EPA that the oil and gas industry wasn't allowed to comment on the rules.

The agency could choose to rewrite the rules, but it overstepped in trying to delay them for years, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided.

The risk of damaging manmade earthquakes striking the Dallas-Fort Worth area is substantially lower than it was last year, according to a new earthquake hazard map released this week by the U.S. Geological Survey.

When Donald Trump was running for president he vowed to boost the U.S. oil and gas industry, much of it found right here in Texas. Now that he’s in office, some of his policies seem aimed at doing just that. But others are having the opposite effect.